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Here our “modern brides” starve themselves to fit into their wedding dresses. In this particular instance, women are being forced to overeat to fit into a beauty image that demands a larger woman.
The traditions of the desert are very much alive in Mauritania, an Islamic republic on the western edge of the Sahara whose people were still almost entirely nomadic when the country gained independence from France in 1960.
Having a voluptuous wife and daughters — well fed to survive the rigors of a desert lifestyle — was long a visible sign of wealth and power among the country’s light-skinned Moors. It is still seen by many as a canon of beauty.
But with Lebanese satellite television broadcasting images of flat-stomached girls cavorting on beaches, and more Mauritanians traveling abroad, the vogue is starting to change.
More than one in five women in Mauritania, which straddles black and Arab Africa, were force-fed as young girls, according to a government survey from 2001, the latest available.
“Our society has this vision that a woman has to be fat to be beautiful. It is a canon of beauty,” said Marienne Baba Sy, head of a government commission that deals with women’s issues.
Having a differing sense of beauty outside the thin and white matrix would be nice, but why the force feeding? Why are women world-wide still expected to look a certain way for the male gaze?

Last week, the bodies of 26 Nigerian girls, aged between 14 and 18, were found floating in the Mediterranean Sea. Autopsies of the bodies confirmed that they drowned while attempting the dangerous and all too often deadly crossing from Africa into Europe. Theirs is a story that’s all too familiar: rather than being treated as murder at the hands of xenophobic, militaristic, nativist states, the deaths of migrants, Black people, and girls are all too often erased and ignored. Their names unknown, their lives cut short, these girls’ deaths are a deliberate attempt by the state to deter migrants, by any means necessary.

The girls’ bodies ...

Last week, the bodies of 26 Nigerian girls, aged between 14 and 18, were found floating in the Mediterranean Sea. Autopsies of the bodies confirmed that they drowned while ...

As I write this, thousands of people are being evacuated from Aleppo.*

The U.N. estimates 400,000 civilians have been killed in the besieged Syrian city since the war started in 2011, deeming it the worst human rights disaster of our century. A city that took four thousand years to build has been utterly decimated. Civilians are tweeting their final goodbyes. Women are committing suicide to avoid being raped and tortured. Evacuees are leaving one war zone for another. And the world has, for the most part,done nothing.

During the third plenary of the 13th International AWID Forum, Co-Creating New Futures, Coumba Toure made a powerful statement: “There will be no future if it’s not feminist.”

Hearing this statement, I immediately imagine a beautiful future where no one ever has to take the streets to demand their humanity; where land and water are always more sacred than profits; and where our bodies are never policed. However during the plenary, the Fearless Collective, an international collective of activists fighting gender violence through art, challenged participants to understand that in order to create that feminist future we have to suspend disbelief.

But what does it mean to suspend disbelief? According to Shilo Shiv Suleman, founder and ...

During the third plenary of the 13th International AWID Forum, Co-Creating New Futures, Coumba Toure made a powerful statement: “There will be no future if it’s not feminist.”

Hearing this statement, I immediately imagine a beautiful future where ...

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